Dropping So Quickly
by Sassassin
Summary: Dr. Mears is one of the hospital's finest; always composed, never disappointing. One day her patient, Alexandra Udinov, might very well be one of a kind, even when she shows up on her table more than once. - AU/Drabble collection
1. Dropping So Quickly

******Tagging: **Nikita, Michael, Alex, Birkhoff, Ryan, Sonya, Amanda.**  
****Ships: **Nalex, mainly. A teeny tiny side of Nowen and Mikita.**  
****Rating: **T.

First and foremost, there isn't nearly enough fanfiction for _Nikita_. That show is one of the best things to ever happen to television, I'm telling ya. They deserve more than they're getting.

Second, I blame my best friend who got me into Grey's Anatomy, and I blame myself for being super obsessed with this show.

* * *

"You've _got _to be kidding me."

There was a quick stream of curses, swallowed by a mouth that didn't stop, fingers digging into the back of her hips and down to the dip behind her knees. She nipped at his neck one last time before she lifted out of his lap, muffling her whine by pursing her lips together.

Her pager beeped unceasingly on her nightstand. She swept her hair to one side, waving wind over her sweat-covered back. His gaze on her felt scrutinizing, and she felt naked in front of him.

Well. She kind of was.

"I'm sorry," she said, scrunching up her nose as she retrieved her lacy panties from the floor and stepped into them. This wasn't awkward at all. "I need to go to the hospital. If you want I've got porn in a shoe box in my closet."

She whirled around the room getting her clothes back on, opting to put on her scrubs straight away so she didn't have to bother at the hospital.

As she walked through her front door she was busy tying up her hair. She stopped on the threshold and looked over her shoulder. "And Sam, please be gone when I'm back."

She rolled her eyes when he called back his name was Owen.

Whatever.

* * *

Thirty hours. That's what kept bouncing through her head as she sped down the avenue to the building looming over the rows of trees. She had just finished a _thirty hours _shift, had had two hours to herself in which she had two cocktails at Joe's and plucked a drunk but attractive stranger from the counter top, and then in the middle of things she got paged.

Freakin' _seriously_?

Only because she didn't want to lose her job did she bother showing up.

Being denied her pleasure after all the work she had been putting in caught up to her in an unpleasantly bad mood that made her crave all the things that didn't involve hospitals, scrubs and scalpels.

She was halfway between cranky and pissed off when she stormed through the doors and found the attending that had paged her, Dr. Collins, always with that smirk on her face as if Seattle Grace had been built to be her runway or something.

It wasn't even anything luxurious or fancy for a catwalk, just another hospital in all its sterile and clean glory.

"What?" Nikita barked, not even trying to hide that she wasn't at all pleased with being there. They were used to a Nikita that was scary in her composure, not her outward anger, and maybe that's why Amanda's face fell, morphed into something a little more sympathetic; the nicest look Nikta had ever seen her wear.

"Pierce and Fletcher took her."

Nikita huffed and swiveled around, sneakers squeaking over the floor as she pushed aside interns that wandered around like the headless chickens they were. Sonya, behind the desk, turned away from her phone for long enough to shout a room number, and Nikita refrained for long enough to order there be a mocha latte the moment she woke up before she disappeared into an elevator.

There were the telltale sounds of hospital, but with doors closed behind her it sounded distant. Tension rolled through her, her muscles cramping in her shoulders.

She knew there, most likely, was a valid reason she had been asked—_demanded_—to come. She knew that whoever she was going to find in that room needed help.

But _damn_, she hadn't gotten laid in months and Owen had gotten off to such a good start.

The room held a girl that couldn't be older than twenty-one. Wild curls lay spread across her pillow and blue eyes were set alight by pain. Nikita knew that look. She had worked for too many years in a hospital not to. Pain could make the most collected people look like they were about to rage.

But she looked out of place in the small room. Closed windows, white walls, hospital smell—a girl bigger than her fragile body, sporting blue fire and proud cheekbones.

"Get out," she told the two interns at her sides, taking the chart from Ryan's hands. They scurried to the door, trying to be the first one out. That's how she liked it. Venting her frustration on those lower than her felt relieving.

She thumbed through the files of one Alexandra Udinov and finally realized why _she _had been the one to treat this girl when numerous residents and attendings were walking around the hospital perfectly capable of doing the same.

A history of drug abuse. A _long _one, too. And no one else on the staff had ever openly admitted to an addiction. No, just her.

Great.

She looked up from the chart. "Are you in any pain right now?"

Alexandra rolled her eyes, face contorted in an uncomfortable scowl. "Oh, no. I'm _fine_. I'm here for shits and giggles."

Nikita put the chart back where it belonged and checked the bag attached to her arm. Pain medication but of the non-addictive kind, pretty tame, definitely wouldn't cut it but the strongest they could allow for those that struggled with addictions. "Well, you'll have to power through it. These dimwits will take you for some scans, I'll see you in the morning."

In the hallway she ordered her interns to not leave Alexandra's side, to go for x-rays and CET scans and anything they damn well pleased, as long as there was a result in the morning. She flicked her middle finger before stalking down the hall.

There was no time to head home. Not only was she afraid to find Owen still there, ready to pick up where they left off, but as is she would already lose too much time.

So she headed for the on-call room, shed her scrubs and curled underneath the sheets in just her underwear. She rolled onto her stomach, trapped her arm between mattress and body weight—fingers squirming and then finally, she worked with the tension that had been building, building, building.

The strangest thing happened. Her mind fluttered back to blue fire when she cried out, and she had the hardest time trying to rid her mental eye of Alexandra Udinov when she dozed off.

* * *

Needless to say, she was a lot less pissed off when six hours later Seymour came to wake her up. She stirred a little, groaned for good measure, and stretched before she realized she had a job to fulfill and a colleague watching her every move.

"Babe, you could've just told me you were finally giving in." He grinned, fingers trailing along her bicep. She swatted his hand away but smiled nevertheless and sat up, clutching the sheets to her chest.

"Get the hell out of here before I make you unfit for work."

"You can make me unfit for anything." He winked but moved out of the room regardless.

She yawned and combed through her hair lazily. Then she hoisted herself out of bed and started moving. Work as she knew it picked up without mercy, but with the mocha latte Sonya handed her following on rounds and checking up on her patients wasn't all that bad. Waving one particularly happy family goodbye lifted her spirits. Her mood was tremendous and she was back to being the old Nikita but Amanda still seemed a little reluctant coming up to her that morning—which was a first, nothing ever shook _the _Amanda Collins.

Ryan Fletcher and Sean Pierce though? They still cowered back when she passed them in the hallway.

She had kept checking up on Alex for last because she had known she needed to spend more time in her room than anyone else's. She had apologies to make.

The television poured music into the room and she closed the door behind her. She had expected there to be friends of family, instead the girl was still very much alone. Alexandra groaned as she propped herself up to see who had come in, another roll of her eyes as their gazes met and she fell back. "It's you."

Nikita hummed, stepping closer. Her sneakers did the squeaky thing again and that sent a wave of nervousness through her that wasn't unfamiliar, but it had been a while.

Maybe it was because echoes of words and sounds, blurry images of tucked away memories swept her away.

Maybe it was because she hadn't had breakfast yet. Who the fuck knew, anyway?

"Look, Alexandra—"

"Alex." The girl smiled. It didn't reach her eyes. "It's Alex."

"Alex." Nikita nodded and sank down on the edge of the bed. "I uh… Last night, I was tired, and I was frustrated. I hadn't had sleep in thirty three hours, and they paged me in the middle of—well, that doesn't matter. Anyways, what I'm—"

"It's fine," Alex chuckled, her fingers curling tightly into the sheets. "Can you fix me?"

"Yeah, of course. Tell me what you feel." Nikita inched closer and peeled the sheets away. Alex didn't stop her when she reached for the robe next, carefully lifting it up slender legs and a smooth stomach. There was a slight bump in her side.

"There," Alex whispered, and the pain seeped into her voice. "It hurts there."

The results of the tests weren't back yet, as far as she knew, but she paged the two interims just to be sure. Then she reached over and patted Alex' hand gently. "Tell me about how you've been feeling lately. Have you been more tired than usual? Fevers? Blood in your urine?"

"Yeah, all of that."

"Okay..." She wet her lips and jotted something down in her chart. Alex had huddled back into her sheets again. "Hey—," Nikita said, standing still halfway the room, "I'm sorry."

Alex smiled, and that time it did reach her eyes, a nice glint mixing with blue fire. "It's fine."

* * *

The tests came back with a positive on malignant kidney cells.

Cancer.

Nikita had to steady herself against a wall.

* * *

Once upon a time she was a young girl as well, fresh in her twenties, struggling with an addiction to ketamine, and wound up in the hospital. There had been a nurse, a beauty with tan skin and red lips, and there had been so many tingles in her gut she thought she needed surgery to get her nervous system back in the right condition.

Though it was the most stupid thought to ever cross her mind, she wondered if she made Alex tingly just the same or if the comparison between the two of them had to stop at the drugs, nothing more, nothing less.

* * *

"We discovered you are in an early stage of kidney cancer," Nikita said, her voice robotic because this wasn't fun news to deliver, but she forced herself to hold Alex' gaze because she needed to know she wasn't alone. "Scar tissue grew into a tumor. We can operate on you today, you'd have an 80% chance of survival."

Alex swallowed loudly, tears blossoming at the rims of her eyes, tiptoeing down the edge of her lashes.

She should have known better than to give in but Nikita crawled into the bed and pulled Alex into her side, pressing her lips to the top of her head. "It's okay. You're going to be okay."

She didn't know if she was saying it to comfort Alex or to comfort herself, and she didn't know why she cared so much.

But they sat there for a while and it wasn't entirely unpleasant. Alex' shoulders shook, but it shifted into hiccuping and then she grew awfully silent.

So Nikita did the one thing she could think of, the one thing she had never done—at least not with a patient.

She opened up.

"I used to be like you," she admitted and smiled down at Alex, who suddenly seemed so broken with her puffy eyelids and her tear-stained flimsy robe. "My poison of choice was ketamine. And I took a _lot _of it. I didn't think it would come to bite me in the ass, but it did. At some point they had me rushed to the hospital. I could've been dead."

Her breath hitched for just a second, enough to make Alex look up with troubled blue eyes. "What happened next?"

"They did surgery, stopped my stomach from bleeding and fixed the tear. When I got out, I got clean. Promised myself I'd make something of my life. And now I'm a doctor and here you are."

"Here I am."

They ate dinner together that night, a bowl of tomato soup, and then Alex had to be prepared for surgery and Nikita needed a lot of fresh air.

* * *

"This is Dr. Cyrus, our anesthesiologist. He's going to put you to sleep," Nikita explained, squeezing Alex' hand. Going out for some fresh air had done her good, but yet her stomach was tumbling forward and forward, never stopping. She had done so many surgeries before, even removing a kidney tumor wasn't the first time, yet something felt so eminently different.

Maybe it was because Alex was her spitting image, ten years prior to where she was that moment, constantly fighting, constantly craving.

"Promise me I'll survive."

Nikita smiled and despite the gazes burning on her back, from people that knew better than to see Dr. Mears make promises because surgeons couldn't keep promises, not in operation rooms—despite all of it, she nodded. "I promise."

Alex slipped into unconsciousness and everything went relatively fast from there. At the end Nikita realized there had been nothing to worry about, had never been. Regardless a ginormous wave of relief flooded through her when they'd sown her up and she got to wheel her back to her room.

She laid in the other bed in the room and didn't sleep until she was sure no complications would show up.

* * *

Never in her life had Nikita felt this responsible for a patient. It reminded her of the nurse, the one that very well might've saved her.

Was this history repeating itself, but with her eternally being the one to get attached? Would this translate into a chain of be helped and then help in return? Would, ten years down the line, Alex save someone from the same nightmares?

She rubbed through her eyes and slipped out of the room at five am.

* * *

Nikita only visited Alex again thirty minutes before she was to be discharged. Her hands wrung together in her lap as they sat across one another in the cafeteria, hustling and bustling, too crowdy for her liking but Alex needed substantial food.

"I say this in your best interests, and not to be annoying, but—you should really try and stay away from drugs."

Alex nodded around a bite of chicken, her nails digging into the table. (Nikita tried not to pay attention, but this time around she couldn't look in those blue eyes. They had to be a lot more gentle, devoid of pain. They were probably beautiful.)

"Promise me."

Alex smiled. "I promise."

* * *

Nikita tried not to think about Alex too much in the days, weeks, months that followed. Eventually she got better at it, dunked herself in a pool of work and patients, rid her mind from wild curls and blue fire.

One time she caved, but then she got drunk and took Michael home with her.

(That was a horrible mistake. The sex was great, but the awkwardness afterwards sucked ass.)

She told herself that she could hang onto the idea that she had given Alex another shot in life, taken her cancer away before it could grow dangerously overwhelming.

Somehow she was at peace knowing that she wouldn't see Alex ever again.

* * *

And then she did.

* * *

"There is no reason to worry," she assured the wife of a guy just taken into the OR. Her smile seemed genuine, and it almost felt genuine, too, but it wasn't. Surgeons didn't often smile genuinely.

Something about being confronted with death 24/7, probably.

It was when she was about to leave when Seymour busted into the room, tugging insistently at her arm.

"What is wrong with you?" she asked when they stood on the hallway. There was something unusual about the way Seymour looked, about how he fidgeted.

She wasn't going to let him beat around the bush on this one so she punched his shoulder and glared.

He sighed. "It's Alexandra Udinov."

She ran. She hadn't ever ran as fast as she did that day to get to the lobby. There was so much noise, Alex' piercing screams resonating, bouncing between the walls.

She looked terrible.

Hollow cheeks, thin body, pale skin.

Nikita could say with certainty that she had relapsed because she knew the signs, could tell them apart from everything else there was to the human body. But there was something else, something that made her voice thin out that wasn't the screaming, that had tainted her abdomen a deep purple.

"Get her to the OR, _stat_," she shouted over the mayhem and wove her fingers through Alex as she helped push the wheelchair to the elevator.

* * *

Kidney failure after relapsing, her blood had contained _so much _meth.

There was a moment during surgery when a tear in an artery leading to her kidney spilled so much blood into her stomach cavity her heartbeat slowed down, so very close to flatlining—

Nikita freaked out, choking on "Don't you die on my table"s and "God damnit"s as she did the best she could to blotch the bleeding.

She got through it. Alex was a fighter, and thank god.

Nevertheless, that hadn't been good for _Nikita's _heart. It beat in overdrive.

When the surgery was over, four hours later, Nikita collapsed in the locker room, drained, in utter despair, all of it so emotionally taxing she felt like she had run a marathon.

Tears of frustration carved down her cheeks as she mulled over what she knew, amidst a headache that was tearing into her.

They needed a donor. For time being they could hook her up to a hemodialysis machine but they couldn't tell how long her body would hold out, how many more complications would show up.

Things looked so bad. Her scrubs were drenched around her knees by the time she stood from the painful position and clocked out for the day.

With her she took Alex' chart and in the coziness of her living room she tried to track down any possible family members.

Nothing.

* * *

Her heart leaped, soared up high, pounded in her throat when she realized she shared a blood type with Alexandra Udinov, girl of wild curls and blue fire, giving her the strangest brand of tingles all over.

* * *

"I'll donor," she said, first thing, as she pulled Michael and Seymour into an empty patient room and peeled off her shirt. "Do all the fucking tests you need to and get my kidney out. _Now_."

Obviously, in fear of losing their nads, they easily complied.

* * *

Getting her kidney taken out wasn't entirely pleasant, but she had taken worse and when she woke up, stomach aching but chest feeling so liberated, so chain-free—well, it was worth it, right?

She moved the bed so she could sit up and realized someone was sitting at the foot of her bed.

Alex.

She still looked terrible, as if she hadn't slept in years, dark circles around her eyes but a smile that beamed so brightly it awoke something inside Nikita that had been buried long and deep.

"Thank you," Alex breathed, sucking her bottom lip into her mouth. "You—you saved my life."

"It's what I do," Nikita chuckled, wrapping an arm around her stomach. She hated for pain to be cockblocking her here, when Alex being discharged couldn't be more than a day away and time was running out, but it was there, tugging at every string within its reach to make her feel smaller than she was.

Alex scooted closer. "Still... I broke your promise and you—"

"Take good care of my kidney, Alex. I'm serious." Nikita pursed her lips, pulling her sheets up higher.

She nodded furiously, squeezing Nikita's hand for good measure. "I won't disappoint you again."

* * *

Nikita sat in a wheelchair when Alex was discharged, guided out by someone from social services and an old friend.

"If I see you on my table one more time you're buying me dinner, Alex," Nikita called out, trying to keep things light and chipper, internally weeping silently because look how far they had come and how far she had grown to care.

It was ridiculous.

* * *

Half a year later, Alex sat on her table again. Locks of hair cascaded in ringlets down her back, her eyelashes like coal wings around blue fire—a different kind. No pain. Something… something good, therefore something Nikita couldn't place.

She could never label _good _emotions.

"I told you—" Nikita began as she entered the room, stuffing her hands in the pockets of her coat. She looked good though. Breathtakingly so, in a little purple number that managed to look so elegant on her, it put a lot of women to shame.

"I know. I made reservations." Her smile was daring. Nikita wanted to kiss it away. "Want to check if I've taken proper care of your kidney?"


	2. Message!

This is **not** the new chapter. I'm sorry for anyone that got their hopes up!

I've been thinking about what the second chapter could be about and honestly couldn't come up with an idea consistent enough to be worthy of being written, so I came up with a plan: I'm going to open up this universe wide and use it to write drabbles as per **your **request.

That's right! I'm taking requests!

The drabbles will mostly center around the Nalex I set up in the first chapter, but other characters can be included just as well, and I'd like to hear what you would like to read! I have some ideas on my own that'll definitely be written and uploaded sometime soon, but y'know, this is a gift to my readers who get to pick what's next!

So let me know what you'd like to read! :)

Love y'all beautiful people. x3


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